Can you imagine if rogues were good at magic?

I'm not suggesting to remove abilities, but to make each more powerful (enough to compensate for the loss of two) and restrict it to one talent tree.

Lethal poisons = Assassinations only
Slice and Dice = Updated and moved to combat only
Rupture = Subtlety only and doing significantly more damage

I'm also suggesting replacement temporary enchant mechanics for combat and for subtlety, that impact damage but are not poisons.

The end result is you end up with a rotation that you WANT to use, not that you HAVE to use become of some constricting talent bonus such as venomous wounds or sanguinary veins. The idea is to make these abilities so potent, that if you ignore them from your rotation, you might as well be an arms warrior without mortal strike.

What If rogues lost poisons, bleeds, and slice and dice...

If rogues didn't have poisosn, bleeds, or slice and dice - they would be in a very bad position. To me, that just proves that the base of our damage is dull and boring. My proposed system, is that we actually DO loose some those abilities per specialisation, but not the damage. WTF I hear you say? Well hear me out. This is not intended to be a damage nerf! Im going to replace them with more interesting alternatives.

What if:

Only assassinations rogues had lethal poison? All rogues have non lethal poison snchants as options.

Only subtlety rogues had bleeds, that were not necessarily finishing moves? No more combat rupture or must use rupture for venomous wounds

Only combat had slice and dice, but instead of it granting attack speed, it gave additional attack strikes? Possibly giving these strikes increased chances to deflect incoming attacks.
Replace increased attack speed with chance to strike twice, like the old sword specialisation.

For combat rogues:

- Being abe to reflect / deflect / disarm incoming attacks and this becoming the "niche" for them, especially in pvp. Combat rogues should be difficult to hit, and then they should utilise your momentum against you in a "ninja-ish" martial arty way.
- New Mechanical enchants for combat instead of poisons, such as sharpening stones, serratted blades, counterweights, weapon oil, weapon traps (hooks either side of the hilt, to disarm on a parry) ect.
These proc events such as striking twice, ignoring armour, disarming opponents, applying group debuffs, absorbing spell damage ect.
I love the idea of some kind of blademaster, messing around with their weapons in their spare time to customise them to their needs.

subtlety and assassinations,

- Merging subtlety into the assassinations tree, so we have an assassin that jumps from the shadows with daggers, then utilises poisons (and possibly bleeds, yes I know might that contradict what's I said earlier).

- I also like the idea of a rogue that utlises magic in the firm of a fire/pyromaniac or arcane/shadow melee damage rogue, and whilst this could fit the rogue class, it doesn't necessarily fit into any talent tree yet.

The free subtlety tree could be used to design a "minor mysterism" tree that utilises arcane, shadow, or fire magic on their weapons to penetrate armour and have greater ranged capability.

I know a few of you seem sceptical about this minor mysterism based 3rd talent tree suggestion, but consider if it worked in a way similar to shadow blades? It could be an entire tree that brought you many powerful, interesting, but balanced cool downs and burst abilities.

It would open it up for having more mischievous tools and manipulation abilities to battle enemies with and hopefully renew the flavour of subtlety, not just as a glass cannon stalker (that would not be lost, it'd be condensed into assassinations) which does not work well for balance reasons but as a manipulative, tricky, melee class that uses some magic to fuel their deception.

Sounds to me like you picked the wrong class. Magic really has no place in the rogue class aside from some shadow related stuff but even that should be kept to a minimum.

GC suggested something similar to this and I think it's a retarded idea. Taking stuff away from specs won't make them more unique, it's the same shit but a different smell... it makes no sense to harm the overall identity of rogues just to create the illusion that our specs then have identity. They need to be innovative and either rework it Warlock style or just leave it like it is. No half-assed jobs.

I have always thought the description of the rogue specs doesn't quite line up with their abilities.

Combat rogues are described as swashbucklers. Swashbuckling (aka fencing) is about as PVP like an activity as you can have. It's all about countering and countering countermoves. Yet combat spec has rarely been useful in PVP. Swashbuckling is also very much a single-target kind of deal, yet combat is the most aoe oriented spec. Some bleeds would be appropriate, but in the sense of a rend-like singular bleed ability caused by piercing weaponry.

Assassination is definitely a single target deal, and should be about rapid application of bleeds and poisons. It probably should be less spammy though and have more build up. Poisons and bleeds could interact a bit to allow some adaptability to various combat situations on the fly as opposed to poisons merely being a single weapon application. Ranged abilities should be available too, although not in a large capacity. Some of the subtlety abilities belong here in my opinion, like shadow step which isn't really all that subtle in that it leads directly to overt action rather than maintaining a constant subtle veil.

Subtlety is the one I think is least like my conception. I always think of this as the mischievous trickster spec. I imagine this would be a better aoe spec in tricking enemies into striking one another and possibly using trap-like mechanisms. While the rogue would have control over their abilities and their stats would impact the damage, the flavor should be more about causing damage to occur through the environment and deception. They may apply some bleeds and poisons but not to the same degree as assassins. The main theme should be that the enemy doesn't know where the damage is coming from.

Although I should point out that I have never managed to level a rogue past 60 because I get bored with them so my conceptions are based on my observations from years of leading raids.

Sounds to me like you picked the wrong class. Magic really has no place in the rogue class aside from some shadow related stuff but even that should be kept to a minimum.

As for the magic suggestion I had (which you're welcome to disagree with) I didn't pick the wrong class, the class I want doesn't necessarily exist. The emphasis has to be on a stealth and duel wielding, but instead of using poisons and bleeds, it utilises fire to ignite and burn enemies within melee range. Why? Because he's a cruel devious little bastard who wants an unfair advantage.

Yes, I get what you're saying that rogues are not completely magical, nor should they ever be spell casters or ranged dps. What I was just suggesting that it would be interesting to play a rogue which was cable of he occasional arcane/shadow/fire finishing move or to set fire to his weapons during combat, like a nightblade from rift.

Poisons and Bleeds feel very rogueish to me. Maybe if we got some better/more interactive poisons and bleeds. Rogue still feels like its in Burning Crusade I really really hope they get a bigger overhaul than Warlocks because god knows they need it.

Sounds to me like you picked the wrong class. Magic really has no place in the rogue class aside from some shadow related stuff but even that should be kept to a minimum.

GC suggested something similar to this and I think it's a retarded idea. Taking stuff away from specs won't make them more unique, it's the same shit but a different smell... it makes no sense to harm the overall identity of rogues just to create the illusion that our specs then have identity. They need to be innovative and either rework it Warlock style or just leave it like it is. No half-assed jobs.

Uhm they did remove alot of spells that had been shared between the speccs. So well.. what you are saying is yes and no to the same thing - it seems - compared to what was actually written by op. All but the magic thingie which got nothing to do with what they did to the locks.(horrible idea as well.. rogues being spell users? play a mage man!..

All three of those are part of the very core of our class. Now yes, I would like our actual bleed damage to be a lot higher because rupture for 2/3 of the specs hits for very little compared to the direct damage finisher (VW damage is not the same as rupture damage). The current implementation of poisons in pve is pretty damn boring and I would love them to spice it up, but I don't want it gone. SnD is fine except for assassination. I don't see a point in a mechanic that automatically takes care of itself 99% of the time. I'd be fine with them dropping SnD from assassination if they don't want to make them actually use it.

GC suggested something similar to this and I think it's a retarded idea. Taking stuff away from specs won't make them more unique, it's the same shit but a different smell... it makes no sense to harm the overall identity of rogues just to create the illusion that our specs then have identity. They need to be innovative and either rework it Warlock style or just leave it like it is. No half-assed jobs.

What I'm suggesting is a huge make over. It's also likely that something similar will happen if ghost crawler has considered it.

I get what you mean about not wanting to loose abilities, but really, how fun is it to keep up slice and dice and rupture? All it does is cause us ramp up time and bring passive damage.

I also think I'm really onto something with the idea of combat being able to deflect attacks, especially in a pvp environment. It's an underused mechanic which is very "roguish" by being able to deflect attacks in offensive ways.

Whilst I'm not for the idea of rogues being tanks, nor is it a new suggestion of "combat tanking" it is something that would not be entirely impossible given the right tools - however my personal view point on it is that it should not exist any more than shamans being able to offhand with a sheild or hunter with a pet.

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Originally Posted by intrinsc

Guys, what if Mages lost the ability to cast? They wouldn't feel very mage-y, now, would they? Here is my proposal to fix mages without the need to cast!

You can make a thread like this about every single class. Class specific mechanics are there for a reason!

Actually a common complaint so far is that some of the dps classes are playing too similarly amongst all their specs. If I was to give hunters the same treatment, I'd say remove pets, Hunter mark, and traps
Instead make pets only available to bm, and Hunters mark marksman only, and make traps only available to survival

Obviously I'd say given them alternative abilities to compensate their damage and utility losses, but it could improve the flavour of each role - but this isn't the hunter forum. After all, you don't see fire mages with frost bolt, and their specs and rotations feel very different to play. But I'm trying to talk about rogues here, not other classes.

Non-lethal poisons can stay for all specs, they're necessary utility and flavour. I just don't think assassinations has a niche all the while everything else has access to lethal poisons. Also, rupture is just annoying to use, we're forced to use it because of sanguitory veins and venomous wounds, but it isn't actually fun to use.

Slice and dice is currently making our passive damage sky high. It only got upped from I think from 30% in tbc to 40% in wotlk because of changes to mutilate dealing less damage, but that's long since been corrected and forgotten about and now efer since we've been damage tweaked around a faster slice and dice time which has given us more passive damage (and lower burst) than ever before, to the point where logs are consisting of approximately 70% of damage from poisons and white hits - andi been happening since wotlk and picked up by devs during wotlk, promised to be correctly in cataclysm, but ignored and then ignored again in mop. It's time for a change, this time I'm hoping they'll pick up on it it's expansion #5 but they never do so I don't hold out much hope.

I get what you mean about not wanting to loose abilities, but really, how fun is it to keep up slice and dice and rupture? All it does is cause us ramp up time and bring passive damage.

I'm sorry but you're crazy. A dot that is actively applied is active damage. You don't consider affliction or shadow to be all passive damage because they are dot classes do you?

As for your later point about the SnD buff a while ago, yeah that was kind of excessive and a dumb/lazy way to bring the damage up. They can reduce it back to 30% though which would reduce passive damage without removing it. Having a buff to keep up is fairly important as a mechanic, so yeah I think its fun to a degree. If they took that stuff out, you'd just be spamming dd abilities and now that would be even more boring.

I think the base base idea (to re-specialize our specializations and build them back up from the ground) is a fantastic idea and I'd like to see it happen.

on the current discussion - I don't mind the idea of SnD, but with auto-attacks counting for so much, and with SnD having no nuances at all, it's boring. Given more complex extension mechanics (like corruption for demonology), and if more of the damage autos contribute were based in SnD and lower totaled, I'd be happier with it. I like abilities like rupture (when they matter; screw you combat rupture) and varied DD options where sometimes pressing a different button is a good idea. Right now we're... stale if you've played for a long time.

As for "magic" being added to the spec, like it or not we already use it, but we could easily insert "alchemy" into the role of adding a new genre of abilities that we specialize in. Alchemists fire and acids, anyone?

I *like* that most of my DPS is from poisons and rupture and slice and dice. I realize this is unpopular with some rogues, but managing them is fun to me. The envenom buff is my favorite part of the class. I like venomous wounds. I like how I can be off the boss because of these things if necessary.

I *like* that most of my DPS is from poisons and rupture and slice and dice. I realize this is unpopular with some rogues, but managing them is fun to me. The envenom buff is my favorite part of the class. I like venomous wounds. I like how I can be off the boss because of these things if necessary.

Do you like their current incarnation though? Because personally, I hate mechanics that you can completely ignore and never see the difference without a really huge sample size because the effect of ignoring that mechanic is smaller than unavoidable variation due to rng. Rupture for combat is definitely in that category, and I'd bet envenom buff maintenance is also or fairly close (not going to use simc to look). I really don't understand how maintenance on something with such a small effect on dps like envenom buff can be your favorite part of the entire class...

I like poisons. I think it's essential to the rogue idea. I like that I have weapon procs that can happen and ignore armor, and I like that one spec is all about them.

I like bleeds, particularly rupture. I think it makes an eminent amount of sense that we would have a dot finisher and a direct damage finisher. I wouldn't mind rupture being tuned a bit higher for all specs, or for venomous wounds to just proc from rupture instead of requiring an active poison too, but fundamentally, I think it's good design that we have a finisher that does more damage, but does it over time (a weaker model) as the compensation. I think that's good for all rotations and is cool, especially combat. Maybe rupture could get double the benefit from bandit's guile, or just be stronger.

Slice and Dice I mostly like because we get to attack real fast. It's super awesome for sub, where we can boost it with mastery and do cool stunts with that. For combat it's a nice buff to maintain, but the very long duration makes me wonder if it's so great. For mutilate, I can take or leave it- it's just something to fuck with my pvp openers, and is lame.

I am fine with poisons and bleeds because I can see those things becoming a larger part of how each spec plays (Subtlety w/ more bleed damage than poison damage, Combat w/ more direct hits, Assassination w/ more buffed poisons).
Slice and Dice, on the other hand, shouldn't be a mechanic for at least 2 of the 3 specs (Combat and Mut). Subtlety is fun right now (as is), Combat could do without it (make Combat into an Arms-warrior Rogue, please), and Mut hasn't wanted or needed it since Wrath.